In Somerville artist Jessica Straus’s exhibition “Packing for Mars,” at Boston Sculptors Gallery from April 4 to May 5, 2024, she “looks forward with dread to a future when humans must flee a devastated Earth to settle on far flung, arid worlds.”
Despite oligarch aspirations, the notion of humans living long-term on other celestial bodies remains a difficult and terribly costly pipe dream due to the lack of necessities like breathable air, drinkable water, things to eat, shielding from cosmic radiation—the sort of resources that are plentiful here on earth.
Straus approaches the subject with grim, wistful humor. She whittles a row of wooden specimens of grasses from her native New Hampshire, like forlorn keepsakes from an extinct now. And she fills small suitcases with dioramas of carved folksy wooden figures looking longingly, regretfully back across space to the fecund earth.
Previously:
• Jessica Straus’s ‘Portrait Of The World Without Us’
• Love And War Inspire Jessica Straus’s ‘TransAtlantic’
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